The For Applicants Page

Much of the information on this page has been replaced (as the site is underconstruction) by material located at the "How to Apply" link on the "Introductory Presentation" page (at www.budokaratehouse.com). Please feel free to read below to see how our program has evolved but be sure to follow the guidlines given at the "How to Apply" link.

The purpose of this page is to give advice to potential applicants to help them understand the program in a format that can be updated easily whenever something comes up that we think potential applicants should be sure to understand. Check this page frequently as we may alter it at any time. If you're applying, please read all the way to the bottom of this page.

Attention foreigners:

BKH does continue to search for a way that we might assist you with your immigration issues so you that might participate in the BKH program. Indeed, we do anticiapte that with time, we will find a way. In the mean time, however, please understand that unless you have some other legal means by which you can stay in the US for three years, you are not eligible to particiapate in the BKH program. If your interest in BKH survives, we do encourage you to continue to minotor this website: As soon as we find a way to sponsor foreigners for long-term visitation rights so that they might attend the 3-year BKH program, we will announce that fact right here on the BKH for applicants page.

***July, 2002 Update***

Just over two years since the first student was admitted to the BKH dormitory program, we have a completely new group of faces in the dormitory. From the first class, of approximately 18 applicants to attempt the program, the ones to make it the longest lasted 15 and 9 months in the program. There were also half a dozen or so that made it for 2 to 4 months, and many that only lasted a matter of days. We do live in a country where "martial arts" very often means feel-good, fantasy training and guys who come here expecting that do fail very quickly.

We at BKH do not merely teach you a skill; we rebuild you into a champion. Your personality will remain intact; mothers are always worried about our trying to brainwash you. This we don't do. We simply make you stronger than you ever could have imagined before through hard physical training. The senior student currently in the dormitory has lost sixty pounds in the 260 days since he's been here. He's now a muscular 165 pounds ( at 5'6"), a weight which he says he hadn't been at since he was in 4th grade. Of course he's learning a skill, but he's not learning it as the 225 pound boy who arrived here. He's learning karate as a man well on his way to having the physical skills to be a champion.

We have expected from the beginning that one from ten will graduate and that it might take as many as five years for the program to produce its first graduates. It is our intention to create fighter instructors of an unparalleled caliber in the US and it is one of our mottos that if residents do not come to question whether or not they're tough enough to make it at least every other week (if not every other day) than we're not fulfilling our goal of making the program the toughest one in the US.

There are currently five residents in the dormitory (seen here) who have been in the program for 260, 141, 82, 45, and 18 days. All students have their sights set on completing the full three year program. It is, therefore, a great time for you to apply. There have been times in the past two years when the dormitory population has lacked the strength to succeed. If those at the top are down, there's very little chance for the newcomers. This, however, is not the case now. These five guys are hungry to become strong fighters and they're fighting to go all the way. Apply now and if you're accepted the population will bring you up. Follow their example, and you just might have a smooth ride to becoming a champion and having a career in karate instruction.

This website is jam-packed with information and photographs from BKH's earlier failed classes. (See especially the "see recent photographs" link below, which are not really so recent any more, because they will give you insight into our training activities.) Please do read the interview with BKH's first student even though he's no longer with us. The photographs on this page were taken this month, in July of 2002.

(Toughman Competions are only for weekend recreation and for gaining a different kind of fighting experience. We are not a boxing camp.)

February 22, 2002 --

We're sending out a number of acceptance letters this week that are conditional upon those applicants obtaining (or re-obtaining) valid driver's licenses. Please note your application won't be turned down becuase you have no driver's license BUT if you are invited to come you will not be admitted until you obtain a valid driver's license. So, advice to those of you who haven't applied yet and have no license: Get a license as soon as possible and write in your application that you are in the process of doing what it'll take to get your license and include some notation as to how long the process ought to take.

***August 22, 2001 Update***

We are sending out six applications this week including one each from Michigan, Indiana, Alabama, Arizona, Nevada and Washington, DC.

We at Budo Karate House are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next applicant who has what it takes to become a long-term member of our team. Since BKH admitted it's first student 15 months ago, a total of 14 students have entered the dormitory. Of those 14, 2 remain. They are Damian Schwartz, now 24, from California who has endured 15 months in the program, and Ted Gohman, 19, from Florida who has endured 7 months in the program. Earlier this summer the dormitory saw five residents for the first time although unfortunately those other three, from Missouri, North Carolina and Georgia, did not have what it took to make it. They lasted 9, 10, and 53 days before quitting in disgrace.

click here to
see recent photographs

BKH's mission is to create competent karate fighter/instructors and we will not compromise what it takes to achieve this mission even if it means graduating one student out of twenty. We are a not-for-profit organization and we do not profit financially at all by keeping members here. If you want to learn full-contact karate as practiced overseas where karate is light-years ahead of anything you've ever seen in this country, this is the place for you. If you want a cool karate summer camp, please forget it and don't waste our time.

And don't waste your own. Those who quit here after just a matter of days leave in disgrace. They leave having had their "karate kid or Hollywood karate dreams" dispelled. Guys come here saying they've been practicing karate for 5 years and they have such and such a belt. They get here, realize that what they've being doing for those 5 years was little more than dancing, and they quit when they realize training for real fighting karate hurts. I.e. guys leave here saying, "Now I know that what I've been doing for the past 5 years was fake. I realize now that I was living a fantasy. But now that I see what real karate is, I realize that it's not for me. It's too hard. Maybe I'll go to college . . . but I'm done with karate."

Nobody here will try to break any applicant. Every new resident in the dormitory is pushed only to the level that his body can handle. No one does any full-contact fighting in their first week or even in their first ten weeks. So why do people quit?

A couple reasons: First, their bodies can handle the training here but their heads can not. Face it, it's not comfortable to wake up every morning at 6:00 and run a four-mile course as fast as you can, and try to beat your time again the next day (we've had guys come here who could barely run a single mile who were running four after six weeks or so), day after day. Young men think it's gonna' be cool to have someone wake you up at 6:00 and make you run and do karate exercises because of how strong it's going to make them and it does, perhaps, feel "cool" up until their first training. But then they start to realize that it's going to be day after day for three years and with very little chance for vacation and they start to panic, because of course there is no gain without a little pain, and that daily discomfort of exhaustion, sore muscles, bruises, homesickness, etc. never really goes away and residents have to learn how to face that fact for three years. Remember we are not about teaching "you" a skill; we are about making a new, stronger you and that takes a lot of hard work on your part.

Second, is because of the rest of the program outside of training. Guys come here thinking only about the training and NO ONE WHO HAS QUIT LEFT BECAUSE THE TRAINING WAS IMPOSSIBLE. Remember that everyone is trained based on their own personal physical ability when they arrive. I.e. someone 40 pounds overweight is not going to be expected to run as fast as a 130-pound former cross-country runner. Instead, most people are broken because of the downtime and the fact that the downtime consists almost ONLY of the following: eating, sleeping, doing chores around the dormitory, working a part-time job for their first several months, writing a daily journal entry and maybe reading and writing letters home whenever there's any free time. But that's about it. There's no games, TV, movies, pizza, girlfriends, chances to show off, etc. It's all karate and there's a reason for this monotony:

You can not hope to become strong by surrounding yourself with soft things and soft ways. To create a fighter from the average American personality, it's necessary to change your entire life, not just to exercise several hours per day. Consequently we have very strict rules here for everything from how to eat, to how to speak with each other, the condition in which to keep our living space, etc. BKH is not a cool hotel in which to live how you want while you do a couple hours of karate training per day. The BKH program is 24 hour per day intensity and many young American men simply aren't tough enough to handle it. It is survival of the fittest here and the ones that make it will be well on their way to becoming truly great.

(This summer we have been on trips to New York City, Montreal, the Atlantic coast several times, and last winter we made a trip to the mountains. "Cool!" guys think, "field trips!" Well, yes and no. We do travel sometimes in order to break the monotony of dormitory life. But is it vacation? No. It's more like drive all night to NYC and on very little sleep do two karate trainings per day for several days then and drive back again, feeling less rested than when you left. Beach trips are for early morning beach trainings. In the mountains last winter we did karate workouts on the ridge of the 2nd highest peak in North Carolina in about 10 degrees temperature not counting the wind chill. Does it sound "cool"? Maybe so. It'll definitely make you strong. But it's not comfortable. It doesn't feed your ego. And the chance are, you're not going to make it unless you can really come to grips with the fact that attaining the level of strength you'll be required to strive towards here, doesn't involve any "coolness"; It only involves hard training, and hard training is never comfortable.

Stay here for three years and you will be truly strong and truly great at karate. That's guaranteed, at least by American standards. But that's also the key: You must stay here for three years. Any less and you will have thrown that time away. Graduate from this program and you will find that you've acquired a ticket to success in life whether it be in a future in karate, or college, or whatever career you choose. But please also understand that to come here and fail means that you will carry that failure forward into your life and that notion of what you could have achieved if you'd just stuck it out will always be with you. Guys who quit don't only leave here with nothing, they leave with that baggage to carry along with them through life as well. You have to decide if you're willing to risk your ego to see if you can make it through this program. If you get here and find out that you can't make it, you'll have realized what you really are, you'll leave your ego here in pieces, and - that's not necessarily a bad thing - but it hurts and you'll carry that forward into your life. Particularly those of you who think you are something when it comes to martial arts might want to consider not coming. At least now you have that belief. If you come here and fail, that's boat's gonna' be sunk.

From the beginning, it has been our assumption that only 1 from 10 students would be able to complete the program and that it might take as long as five years for the program to produce its first graduate. That depends on you. BKH is a career-track program designed to train karate teachers and you do have an excellent opportunity if you participate now because you have the chance of being one of the first graduates and thus of eventually holding a very high position of seniority in what we hope will become a nationwide network of full-contact karate dojos during the next 20 years. (We anticipate that three quarters or more of BKH graduates will go on open their own schools in the future.) But again that depends on your determination to succeed in the face of what you will see may well be three of the hardest years of your life. We would sooner spend all of our resources creating one single competent karate fighter/instructor in a decade than a 100,000 member nationwide organization of dreamers.

***March 12, 2001 update***

Meet BKH's second class! From left to right: Damian Schwartz, 23, from California, BKH's first resident student, has returned to the program bringing his total to 252 days; Ryan kendrick, 20, from Florida has been in the program for his first 30 days; Ted Gohman, 19, from Florida arrived just four days after Ryan, giving him 26 days in the program; and Matt Stuart, 22, from California, has been with us for his first two weeks.

Advice for potential applicants:

1) Be sure to read the entire interview with our first member and the accompanying "director's commentaries," all the way through to the end. This is the best way we can think of to make you understand the nature of the program. (If your browser does not support layers and the "director's commentaries" windows are not popping up on your screen, you will find the entire text of the interview including the commentaries on the "text only" page.

2) The only way to apply to the program is to follow the instructions provided in the "introductory presentation," and write to the address there given. Please understand that we will not answer any questions until we have your completed application in hand. (Again, see "text only page" if your browser does not support layers.)

3) In our ad, we have requested that you send $10 for the application materials. However, the application materials that we will send you for that $10 actually costs a good bit more to print, compile and mail. We do this because, since the beginning, we have wanted to give everyone the opportunity to apply, hence the small price for application materials. However, these days we are sending out so many applications that the cost of their printing and shipping is starting to be a burden. If you are applying for the BKH program, please consider making a purely optional donation $20 for your application if it's possible for you to do so without subjecting yourself to too much hardship. Surely, everyone will not pay $20 for an application, but those who do will help to offset the money we lose by offering aps to the masses for less than it costs to print them. Of course we can not guarantee any applicant admission, but your $20 donation for an application will be very much appreciated and remembered. Remember that we are a non-profit organization and are not about making money. We do, however, have bills to pay so that we might continue to provide this opportunity to those who want to try.